CEOCODILUS NILOTICUS. 21 
epine sur la teste avec laquelle ils piquent le haut du palais du crocodile, et lui font 
ouvrir la gueule malgre qu'il en ait." This reference to the bird being provided with a 
spine, wrongly placed, however, by Marmol, is of interest when taken in connection 
with the story told by the Arabs of the present day. Indeed his account was in all 
probability derived from the Arabs he met with during his visit to the Nile valley. 
Pere Sicard \ in one of his letters from Egypt written in the first or second decade 
of the last century, mentions the sagsag, the ibis, Egyptian goose, and little egret as 
birds of the Nile, and adds that the first is the trochilus of the ancients. The term 
sag-sag or zig-zag is rendered in Arabic j)jij, and is applied by the inhabitants of 
Egypt to Hoplopterus spinosus, also known to them as <w». UJ :=Sisah, and appropriately 
by still another name, viz. <tiyi^jl=Abu choka, or the father of spines. The term 
Sisah is also applied to Pluvianus cegyptius. 
When Geoffroy St.-Hilaire Avas at Thebes he learned that there was a small bird 
that flew without ceasing from place to place, "jusque dans la gueule du crocodile," 
asleep or feigning to be so, attracted to it by the presence of insects. This bird, he 
says, was seen everywhere along the Nile, and when he became possessed of a specimen 
he recognized in it a species that had already been described by Hasselquist under the 
name of Charadrius cegyptius. On carefully considering what Geoffroy says about this 
bird, it is evident that the species he obtained could not have been C. asgyptius, as has 
been generally supposed 2 . He says " nous avons, en France, un oiseau tres-voisin, s'il 
n'est le merae ; c'est le petit pluvier a collier," and in another passage he speaks of it 
as " le petit pluvier." If he had had Charadrius cegyptius before him he would never 
have made this comparison, as there is no bird in France at all resembling it, and, 
besides, it could never be said by anyone knowing the two birds, C. cegyptius and 
yEgialites curonica, that they might perhaps prove to be identical, which, however, is 
perfectly true of the " petit pluvier a, collier " of Egypt and France. Moreover, from 
the fact that he states that the bill of his supposed trochilus was so fine that it could 
only pick up small insects, the spawn of fish, or little fragments of animal matter cast 
up by the river, it is perfectly clear that he was not dealing with a bird having the 
strong bill of Charadrius cegyptius, but with " un oiseau tres-voisin, s'il n'est le meme ; 
c'est le petit pluvier a collier." This appears to be a perfectly legitimate conclusion. 
The lesser ringed plover, according to the majority of ornithologists who have written 
on the birds of Egypt, is universally distributed and very common. From its habits 
it is quite as likely to fly about and even to settle on a sleeping crocodile as any of 
the other birds to whom the habit has been ascribed, and, moreover, we have Geoffrey's 
testimony that he had seen it flitting from place to place, "jusque dans la gueule du 
crocodile endormi ou feignant de l'etre." 
1 Lettres edifiantes, v. nouv. ed. 1780, p. 351. 
2 Dictionary of Birds, by A. Newton and H. Gadow, part iii. 1894, p. 733 footnote. 
